Plum Orchard
Laura Elizabeth Woollett (University of Melbourne, Australia)
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Lover, I still feel your sting, though they think me cured. I walk to the plum orchard in my innocent frock. It is the first time that I’ve been out this summer. I bring along slack skin, smell of bed. If I were fruit, I would be long-fallen, like the plums that squelch underfoot. These are the fruit that the hornets like best. They haunt them like Ted Bundy at the dumpsite with his dead girls. He would paint their faces, even as they wormed and yielded beneath the makeup brush. The hornets are vicious in their haunting. They would not hesitate to sting anything that gets between them and that fruit, sweet in its putrid pooling. The heat agitates them. The heat makes things rot quicker. The whole orchard is aswarm with their black and yellow bodies, feasting upon that poor softness. In childhood summers, hornets would sometimes float up from the orchard and catch in my gauze curtains. I would lord over them with a can of poison, spraying through the gauze, rejoicing in the threat that I had reduced to a flinching marionette on my bedroom floor.
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Laura Elizabeth Woollett recently completed an honours degree in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis focused on scattering and dismemberment in the works of Francesco Petrarch and the Marquis de Sade. Her first novel The Wood of Suicides is forthcoming with The Permanent Press in January 2014. Find her at her website.
